Empowering Hiring Teams at Scale: Adam Meekhof on Modern TA Leadership

Hey everybody, what's up? You are live on Shelly's Alley. It is Friday, February 27th today. I gotta check my calendar because the days is kind of, you know, go right by, but it is Friday. Finally much warmer here in Atlanta where we both are.

Yes, temporarily though. I'm in Florida for a soccer event for my daughter.

Oh, I missed it. All right, well, so close. Yeah, close, close. But the weather's nice when you get back, hopefully.

That's what I'm hearing. I'm hearing we're getting some good stuff finally.

So today's guest is Adam Mikoff. He's a director of talent acquisition and a recruitment analytics self-proclaimed geek. I don't know if you can call yourself a geek. Yes, you can. Um, who actually really makes the numbers matter. He's scaled health sciences revenue by 50%. He's reduced 200 open recs to 40 in 6 months, not by closing them but filling them. Staffed 80 roles in half a year, uh, hired a chief scientific officer in 3 weeks. Um, so, you know, Adam, uh, is, is here. He blends data, process optimization, and servant leadership to turn teams into high-performing machines. But he still believes in the human side of things, which we're going to touch on today as well. So it's not all about the numbers. But if you believe metrics should drive impact and not just dashboards, um, this is, this is the conversation for you. So, um, you ready for this, man?

Oh, I can't wait, especially with an intro like that. I really hope that I can't, I can't let, I can't let this intro go down. Like, I mean, it, it was pretty hyped. So yeah, I'm excited.

Oh yeah, man, it gets better, it gets better. Yeah, let me give you center stage and, uh, ready to rock.

All right, absolutely.

So my first question, um, you know, I said, you know, you call yourself a recruiting analytics geek. Um, so let's, let's pull that thread a little bit. What's one metric that— or I should rather, I should say measurement, and I'll explain why later, but one measurement that most TA leaders obsess over that you think is misleading or even dangerous?

I'm gonna, I'm gonna say it, I'm gonna say it: time to fill. Oh yes, I am over it in so many different ways because it's a, it's a loaded, it's a loaded metric. It doesn't actually tell you what happens. It's the byproduct of doing work. And I'm tired of someone telling me that my recruiter that has a time to fill, let's say it's because I'm in high volume, 28 days, it isn't as good as the one that's doing 17 days. And I'm like, did you know that that person's recruiting in Monroe, Louisiana, that has a total population of 7,000 people? And I'm looking for a specific skill set. It does, you know that.

Yeah.

So I just, I'm the, I'm the guy that'll stand up and say time to fill is the byproduct of my work. And I'm not as concerned about that end number as I'm concerned about what happens before it. That's, that's, that's the magic to me.

I mean, yeah, time to fill is like— it needs to— time to fill needs to just die already. There's absolutely no— there's no benefit to reporting on it. There's no— there's, there's very little impact in changing it. And it's, it's hard to— it's hard to change it, but it doesn't tell you— it doesn't tell— it has no meaning. It's worthless as a measurement of efficiency, productivity. There's just nothing, there's nothing it can tell you. And it's so variable that like, yeah, I'll give an example. When I've run some analysis as a consultant, I do one of the first things that I do with most companies after we do kind of like a needs assessment, put together the plan for the engagement, One of the first things we do is a diagnostic or an audit, or not an audit in like that people think audit and they go, oh my God, not like an IRS audit, but more like an assessment of like what's going on. And they always ask about that. And every time I've done this, I can tell you with certainty that the mapping, if you take a scatter chart and you put it on one of those statistical analysis charts, this, the scatter chart almost always tells 2 or 3 stories. One of the stories is a bunch of dots over in the 0 to 1 days. So a bunch of recs that get filled like literally instantly. These are all of the recs where you moved somebody from another rec, or you had somebody there— they are get— they get open, the candidate gets slotted in, and they get closed. Their internal regs, all that stuff. So there's a whole bunch of those in the 0 and 1 days, 0, 0 day or whatever. And then there'll be the second story, then there'll be some scattered everywhere but a density of them way off in the distance, like at 80, 90, 120, 170, you know, days. And if you average it out, you get 45 days. So everybody that you talked to was 45-day time to fill. But nobody fills in the middle. At 45 days, there's no dots. Sometimes the third story is there's not a whole lot of pattern and it really is just everywhere, but it doesn't tell you anything. It's ridiculous.

No, I can tell you some of my best recruiting ever was I was running a recruiting department and I was recruiting for a manufacturing facility and it was electro-maintenance mechanics. It is one of the hardest skill sets to find on earth. If anybody's doing it Electrical? Yeah, it's basically the ones that go in and fix the electrical side of all those fancy manufacturing equipment, right?

Gotcha.

Well, skilled trades— what do you think's been happening in the skilled trades for the last however many years? It took me— you nailed it, right? You nailed it. So it took me, it took me I think 5 months to fill one, and I will tell you, I recruited harder on that role than I ever did on that one that you gave me the, the props for, that chief scientific officer in like 3 weeks. I'm like, I spent so much time on that. I'm like, I worked harder on that and people are telling me like I'm the man. And I'm like, no, I'm not.

You're like, yeah. So I would say the second one would be cost per hire. Yeah, second one. And only because it's— yeah, you say it, you say it.

Yeah, like cost per hire. Like, I used to do like cost per hire analysis because then I was a consultant, and when I did it, it was like, they're like, oh my, look how much money you saved, and da da da da da. And I'm like, well, where— what's the actual impact? What is the ROI? And I, I love to say you can take your cost per hire and then leverage it with what is that role doing back to the business, and now you can see like Like, that's where there's a number. But again, it's, it's such a generalized number of what cost per hire is. It doesn't tell you, doesn't tell you how you're making that hire. And I just—

these generalized doesn't do a lot of forensics. Yeah, the only thing, it's, it's much better than time to fill because it's something that you can have a little bit of control over, and it can tell you when you're saving money if that's important to the organization. But is hiring faster really important to the organization, or is hiring good people? Same thing with cost per hire. Okay, so the cost goes up, but we still need to hire. I mean, what are we gonna like stop it, you know? And the biggest problem that I have with cost per hire is, unlike with time to fill, is that it, you know, time to fill has a lot of fallacies around like when do you start. Do you start when the job is approved? Is it when it's posted? Is when the posting goes down? Is it, you know, there, whatever. But even if you could agree on you start when the job is posted and you finish when the job is closed, then what does that mean? Is it because somebody got an offer? Is it an offer accept or an offer extended? If it's an offer extended, then did it get a, you know, if it's, if it's a start date, then that's a whole other set of problems because now you've got background checking or whatever. Now with cost of hire, the math is ridiculous because I've never met an organization that I've been in as an, as a consultant where they actually accurately measured cost per hire. They almost always exclude things like the cost of their website.

That's what I was gonna say, they're forgetting the, the other costs they have baked in of their recruiting team.

Yeah, right. All they look at is the advertising, like job postings. That's it. Yeah, it's like, well, what about the cost of the overhead of having a, you know, a person doing this job? Um, or they look at staffing, you know, did we pay staffing fees? So what's the average cost per hire? $4,500, which again, did you pay employee referrals? Because there's $5,000. Do you have a website? Do you have a CRM? Do you have, you know, there's so much other stuff. Interviewing.

Yeah.

Travel. That's never looked at because it usually comes out of a different budget.

Yep. Right. And I've done it in the past when I was a consultant. Someone said, well, last year we paid our agencies to do contingent hiring this dollar amount X. We want to save money. So I was assessed, did I make them spend less than that? So yeah, I'm going to—

on that one thing, I'm going to go perfect.

I can do a straight conversion on that. I'm not going to tell you all the other stuff, but if that's what you spent and you spent X with me, you saved this much money, I did my job well. Like, if that's as basic as we're going, great. But like you said, yeah, yeah, I mean, it's not a— you don't get the— what I always say, you got to know what does it take to get to your end number because that's the byproduct of the work. I'm more concerned about the work not the byproduct.

So you reduced 200 open recs to 40 recs in 6 months. Forget about the 6-month part, time to fill, just the fact that like that this is a huge number of, uh, of closures, of like, of like filling jobs. What was— was there an— like, was there like some kind of impetus Or did somebody like electrify your chair? What, what happened?

Um, I sat down and I had to— I assessed and said— I basically, I saw all the variables in the process. People were doing what they wanted when they wanted. I wanted to interview this way, I wanted to interview that way. There's too many interview plans. So I said, okay, I went to every leader and I basically interviewed them on how they consider their interviewing process.

Okay.

And basically I did what everybody does. You lay it out on paper and you say, what's your What's your similarities? What's your differences? Are the differences value add? What's going on here? And basically all I did was said, you have, you need to hire these 200 people. And then we hired 160 in that 6 months. I said, but out of those, out of those, all those groups you have, I think we were up to like 12 different interview plans and there was no impact to it.

It was just going, hey, I want to standardization.

So, and I want to tell you I have the magic sauce, but what it was was I standardized the process. I looked, I looked at our comp rates. I did a true assessment of the comp. What are we doing? How is it going? What's going on with it? Are we within market? If we're not, is there a reason why we're not? What is all that? Okay, we're not competitive. We got to raise this. And then I just looked at my team and I said, all right, they're holding us accountable to fill these. And I've already looked at every one of the leaders and said, if you're going to hold me accountable to fill these, I'm going to hold you accountable to interviewing the candidates. You don't get to no longer sit here and say, I don't have candidates, I don't have quality candidates. And I mean, basically, I looked at them, I said, I looked at the leadership and I said, do you want this done? They said, yes. I said, are you willing to do it the right way? They said, absolutely, because this has to get fixed. We're not getting product out. We're not doing what we're supposed to.

And I said, well, that's what I wanted to get at. So that was the impetus. So I was like, how did you even get— because process optimization requires some trade-offs.

Yeah, absolutely.

But so why did you decide, I'm gonna freaking do this? Like, did somebody poke you, or did you just—

it was basically what I was brought in to do. I was brought in, okay, I was brought in to fix what was going wrong in recruiting. And it typically—

what was the biggest thing that had to stop? I don't care if it's recruiting, hiring, but what was the biggest thing that you're like, guys, we can't do this anymore, this one thing, you know, just gotta go?

It was hiring managers working at their own pace. And not understanding. They weren't understanding. They weren't even understanding the business impact of these roles not getting filled completely, right? Right. They were only looking at their one department.

They were fitting it in whenever they could. Like, this is a must-have.

Yeah. They weren't like— so what it was was basically getting their leaders saying, you know the greater impact of this. If we don't get this done as a team and together, and I flat out told them, if I'm not getting you the submittals, I want you to call me the first thing and I want you to rip me. I want you to destroy me and I'll take care of it. But I said, on the other end of it, if you really want this fixed, guess what I'm going to do when your people aren't interviewing? And everybody was on the same page. We sent it out to the entire leadership program, and next thing I know, people were interviewing. We, we created like just— we created a rule as an organization: if you have open time on your calendar, recruiters don't ask, they put interviews there, and you can't say no. And you can't say no. And as soon as everybody saw that Roles were getting filled, projects were getting done, hiring managers, um, hiring managers were even happier because they didn't have to worry about, um, they weren't worrying about people getting in or they knew what was going on.

Yeah.

And then we reported it all out. So I want to tell everybody like I'm some magician, but it really was just finding out why weren't people doing what they said they were going to and then bringing it to the people that can make the impact and then empowering my team to do their job. I'm the person that says, I'm the person, once my team knows what to do, I really try to get out of their way and work behind the scenes to knock down more roadblocks for them. And that's all it was. It wasn't some magic sauce. So sorry if there's someone listening hoping I was gonna fix that problem for them.

No, I wasn't expecting that, but I was gonna ask you as a follow-up, what are the first 3 data points that you looked at to diagnose? Right.

Whether the first— I mean, the first—

you started with something, you didn't know what was going on. So what were the first 3 things you had to look at?

The first thing that I looked at is how long from submittal until they got feedback from the hiring manager, right? Like how long it—

not time to submit, but time to feedback.

So the first thing I wanted to know, because I always say like the end goal was to get a hire, and I literally went one stage at a time back and saw how long it was. And the thing that I assessed first was I didn't even know the full, like I didn't even really start to understand how long it took my recruiters to submit because the days were so glaring that it took in the submittal to get the interview. Like we're talking at times 10 days before we would get feedback. Well, you can't, I don't, unless you're on vacation, it doesn't matter, right? So basically it was, that one was so glaring, we gotta attack and fix that. The next one was, the next one was our interviews to submittals were off. My recruiters were interviewing a ton of people, but then the submittals were off.

Got it.

Or they wouldn't submit. And I'm like, well, then you're not interviewing the right people. What are you doing? Do you understand the role?

And then I just— they were interviewing them out. They were screening them out for some reason.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it was.

And let me guess, it was probably because they were active applicants.

A lot of it was active applicants and they didn't understand the job. So even they didn't understand the job fully. So when they interviewed people, so I think I'm saying this wrong. So let me take a step back. We were submitting, once we did get feedback, we submitted too many people that weren't actually qualified for the job because the recruiters didn't understand the role enough. We would submit tons of people, submit tons of people. It would take a long time to get feedback and then they'd only interview like one of the peers people. So then I had to assess, and it basically came down to they were in submittal too long, but the reason they were in submittal too long is the hiring manager was reviewing too many people that weren't qualified, and they didn't trust the recruiters because they were submitting the wrong people. So they just said, this is— they don't know what I need.

Which is interestingly one of the biggest, you know, advisory recommendations that I make, very biggest and most frequent. So one of the most frequent and one of the biggest is that as a consultant, you know, you've been in that role. Hiring managers' number one complaint about recruiting is, I'm not getting enough resumes. And recruiting's complaint, number one complaint about hiring managers is, I'm not getting any feedback. Now, you would think, looking at— if you don't know anything about TA, or you're looking at it from the outside, or you're not educated in kind of the consulting process, NTA, those two things sound like two different things. But they are the exact same thing. The hiring manager is saying, I'm not getting enough resumes that I like. Yep, you know, more volume. The recruiter hears, I want more volume, but it's not. And the recruiter saying, I'm not getting any feedback, is because they're sending the wrong resumes. And typically it's because they're sending too many. So paradoxically, the fix to I'm not getting any feedback and I need more resumes is less resumes.

Yes, you actually— so it's so funny that you said that because the way I start going through it when I talk to my recruiters, I do the— I mean, it's basic, it's kind of like this basic engineering mindset of reverse engineering the funnel. The end goal is the hire. How many people do you have to— and I personally do it over submittals. Other people say they like to do it on interviews. I personally like to say, how many submittals does it take for me to get a hire? Because that tells me how much I understand my role. And what I try to do is I want to try to get my recruiters to— if I can get my recruiters to 3 submittals to 1 hire, that means most likely, that means they understand their role. That means they are—

that's incredible. So you're saying 3 submittals to hire Yep. Which I'm assuming that also means 3 submittals, 3 interviews.

Correct. I'm saying if I'm submitting, like, and again, I've been doing this for a long time and this is not braggadocious, my ratio when I quit just recruiting every day was 3 submittals to a hire. If I worked with you exclusively, Shelly, and I submitted you 3 people, you were hiring one of them. I always say most likely there's a chance that was a fringe, do I want to interview them or not? 2 definite interviews, and 1 was getting hired. So my goal is always to get my recruiters as close as I can to that, and I start to look at how they're working their day. So when I say that I'm a geek, I time studied my day. I studied my day. How long does it take me to review?

Yeah, I do. I have that too, by the way. I use, um, I use a, an app called RescueTime that sits on all my machines.

I bet it's better than my antiquated Excel spreadsheet that I created on my own.

I have that too, but it started with that. So RescueTime looks at all the activities on all my machines— my phone, my iPad, my computer, um, and, and my laptop and my desktop— and, um, there it knows which things, it knows which activities to ignore. So if I'm doing something, you know, if I'm like on my iPad and I'm playing a video game, it knows, okay, I'm not working right now. So it looks at that, and then I have that spreadsheet that it puts out. It's it's not really a spreadsheet, it's more like a visual. I have that and I have a prompt in Claude that I use to analyze it that has a matrix for scoring, you know, closer to the goal, plus minus. And it'll come back and it'll tell me, here's some activities that you could improve on, reduce friction, eliminate, whatever. And so that time study is something I've been doing for 25 years. I used to do it as a spreadsheet, but now I have—

Yeah, I wrote it down, so I'm actually learning something. I wrote that down because I literally, And again, because I, I always joke and say I'm the, um, undiagnosed poster child of ADHD. I used to have to— my boss used to make me put check marks on my desk every time I stood up because I'd get distracted. And they didn't do it because I wasn't performing. They're saying, hey, like, look how much you're getting done, but look how much you're wasting. You're wasting. And it caused me to go down it. Yeah, but that's why I love—

I—

that's why I love, like, what's going on in each stage will tell me. And I always start at the end game and we work it back. Like I said, I can tell you typically typically with new recruiters, their ratio of submittal to hire is gonna be somewhere around the 10. It's gonna take 'em 10 submits to get to a hire depending on the skillset and the environment that you're in and what all that. But I wanna see how fast I can get it down to 5. And then from there, now I'm talking, now it's just getting into perfection and we just talk about each step. Why did you enter that interview? Those people, my favorite question on earth is why did you do that? Why are you doing that? And it can tell me what they're doing in each stage and why they're doing the next step. And then I look at how long it takes after they do their part. How long does it take for the hiring manager to do their part? Again, same thing. Why I say time to fill, like what you were talking about is such, such a loaded one because I love how you're like, well, when is it? When does the clock start? When does the clock stop? What are we doing about— what are we doing about the drug test background, onboarding activity, physical activities of filling out paperwork? When's new hire orientation? Like, what are we calculating here? So that's why I like— I look at those activities a lot.

There's my, there's my rescue time for the— this is for the week.

That's awesome.

Because it's Friday, um, I can actually do it, otherwise it looks kind of weird.

So for you, how did you do this week?

Um, so can you, can you see it or no?

Yeah, I can see it says like 90, and it says business, communication, reference.

Zoom out. What happens if I zoom out? Is it better?

Yeah, I've seen more.

Yeah, so, so basically, yeah, business is work, communication and scheduling is also part of work, reference and learning, and uncategorized are like a bunch of little random things that it hasn't seen before. But it says, um, my goal for the week is 21 hours of focused work. I'm at 19 and 53 for the week, so I'm a little bit off, um, this week, but it's probably because some of the uncategorized activities So I can see on Monday there was an hour of like whatever neutral, but it does this plus minus and I can drill down on which, you know, documents and everything like that. So it's pretty, it's pretty amazing.

That's awesome.

And then I feed that to the, you know, the prompt. I have this prompt that I use that knows what to look for on this. So I'm actually playing with the idea of running this on my my, my agent that he has. So every Friday it'll pull the report and then give me the feedback without me having to ask, because right now I have to remember to do it.

Yeah.

So what I'll end up doing is I'll like, I'll give it 2 or 3 weeks and be like, look at my last, you know. But so, um, I love it. Well, that now. So, um, yeah, I'll share that with you. The, the point I was— absolutely. The point I was getting to though um, is there's these activities that you do that you have to do, and they take time, and you can't really do anything about them. And there's ones where you, you know, you've— like, recruiters sometimes get trapped in this. They feel like they owe it. For example, I'll give you an example, and I'm sure you've got millions of them, but for example, hiring manager says— sends an email to the recruiter saying, hey, um, do you have Samantha's resume? I, I I can't find it, or can you resend me Samantha's resume? Now, with all due respect, I ain't your bitch, man. I'm not gonna, you know, I sent you the resume, you know where it's in your inbox, you know how to get to the ATS, like you don't really need, and so recruiters that do all this customer service because they're afraid that, this is not your customer, this is your partner. So sure, yeah, get them the resume, but then somehow you gotta figure out a way to— if this happens a lot, um, to organize this person so that they can find their own resumes. They shouldn't be interrupting your workflow for you to go dig up a resume that you already sent. That's just an example, right?

Yep.

You know what I'm saying? So recruiters get stuck in this, like, I have to serve the hiring manager, they are my master. It's like, no, they're not. Not even close. Yeah, they're the other— it's a three-legged stool. You got the recruiter, the hiring manager, and the candidate, and they're all three part of the same process. It's not like you don't serve the candidate, you don't serve the hiring manager, hiring manager doesn't serve you, hiring manager doesn't serve the candidate, the candidate doesn't serve you. You know, these are three parts of an equation, not subservient. So I think people just get lost in that, you know.

Yeah, and I think part of it is, is You know, I think sometimes we also have to make sure we're using the word serving right. Like, because I understand from the way that you described it to me, I 100% agree with you, right? We are in a, what I would say, a service-based industry.

Yeah, we're in a service-based industry, whether we want to say it or not, right?

So, but there's a difference in how you do it, correct? So it's, it's different how you attack it, right? Like, like you said, I know I have certain hiring managers they're going to ask me for a resume. And I'm like, hey, not a problem. What can I do? I'll ask the question. What can I do next time so you can just find it yourself, right? And, or I'll say, I've done this so that they understand that I'm important, my time's busy. I was like, not a problem to get you this resume. When do you need it by? Because I'm in the middle of something. As soon as you say that, what do they always say back? Oh, I'll be able to find it, no problem.

I'll find it myself, right? Yeah. And so there's ways to push back, but that's my point is there's a lot of these little microtransactions that erode your time away, and you end up doing this customer service, which isn't what we do, function. And it takes away from, you know, the, the, the, um, it takes away from time to fill and it adds to cost to hire. I'm just kidding.

Full circle, shall we?

Yeah, that's right. It takes away, it erodes from your value add because now you're just doing something that anybody else could do. It's not while you're there. But so you, you filled— and I had to, I had to ask you this question because I was reading about this— but you filled all kinds of jobs from line workers to CSOs, as in scientific officers, science officers, familiar with, with that, familiar with that spectrum. Um, you've actually worked on line workers?

Yeah, I, uh, built a recruiting, uh, department for a manufacturing company, um, in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

Assembly line.

Yeah, line workers.

Yeah.

Are you, are you talking about linemen on the power lines?

That's what I thought.

Yeah, no, I'm not there yet. I haven't done that one yet.

Build one of those. There was a huge project, a huge initiative in Western Australia, and it was really challenging because power lines people don't have any electronics or metal objects when they're walking on power lines. It's just they're really hard to find and, and they're always out on the road. There's, you know, they're not, they're not the most internet-enabled, um, people. I mean, they go online after work but not during work at all.

Yeah.

So I'm gonna say, anyway, so you've got, you got from like assembly line workers to chief scientist officers or chief—

yeah.

What, what changes from super operational to super executive? Is it— and I'm making multiple choice— is it, is it a sourcing channel? Is it a stakeholder management? Is it signal detection? Is it narrative? Is it alignment? What's the biggest change when you go from, you know, seriously, um, to me it's, um, I'm gonna go with stakeholder management. Is the biggest— that's the biggest change I have.

Like, when I start working on the higher level roles, sourcing functionality— I, I mean, it's funny, right? Like, because I sit there and say you have to source your ATS if you get a lot of applicants anyways, or you have— or you're sourcing on outside places if you don't get a lot of applicants. So to me, that doesn't really differentiate. It's the stakeholder, because there's a lot of times that when you get higher level— it's funny, I watch all these people, they're like, well, I've had it where I was working on director or VP level roles and I was like, oh, I was watching the news and I saw the job reports and they said everybody's looking for a job. And I'm like, right, everybody in our industry at the level that you're looking for, they're just hanging out there. So it's this, um, this, it's this level of expectations that come with title I felt that I've had to manage differently. Yeah, like I get it all the time. I get it all the time, right? Like it's, it's weird because Man, recruiting on a manufacturing line, an hourly employee— and I don't even like using that, I'll use frontline worker.

Frontline worker, yeah.

Frontline worker, they are so vital to an organization.

Oh, absolutely.

And, and, and, and the recruiting people think it's just so easy.

It sometimes can be, you know, it can be very much like it can be very performative, it can be very, um, you know, process-driven. Literally, you have people lining up, you know. Um, correct. But it doesn't mean that it's any easier necessarily, just that the challenges are— that was my question, is what the shifting, right, is, you know, you may not need to source, but still.

So I feel like at times when I was doing— when I switched from frontline workers to higher level they felt that the candidates should be coming at the same speed.

Oh, see, that's definitely— yeah, that's a big change.

Does that make sense what I'm saying? Like, yep, they're like, well, I don't understand why am I got— they'll be like, did you post the role? And I'm like, yeah, I posted it. Well, why am I not getting that many applicants?

And I'm like, because the chief science officer is not— they're not out there applying for jobs. And that's what I said, apply for a job. They're not, you know, pushing you for an interview. They're not It's not like they're like, I got to make a decision this week, you know. It's—

yeah, so it's, it's that management of saying— and I'm, I'm so big on that in the very beginning of the intake call— this is not going to come from an applicant most likely. If we get an applicant, I want to be perfectly clear, you, you can give me the credit if you want, but it's not because I'm a great recruiter. I got lucky. Yes, I brought the candidate through the profile— I mean, the process and all that, and still have to close them. But that's a lot of times what I see the difference is.

Gotcha. Okay, um, let's switch topics a little bit into another part of your, of your, uh, you know, your experience, your background. You talk about servant leadership and data, um, so when we're just talking about service, so I'm kind of segueing back into it because I did, I did say we're not in the service business. We, we do provide a service Yes. And if you're going to be, especially, you know, as a director, as a global head, like I was, you know, recently in different capacities as a consultant, etc., servant leadership is kind of a different beast altogether. But those two are sort of different universes, right? Like data and being data-driven and being a servant leader are not— I'm not saying they're incompatible, but they operate in two different spaces. How do you not become a spreadsheet dictator as a data-driven person? Data can demoralize and make people be like, chase the numbers. Like, how many calls did you make? I mean, I know you don't do that, but sorry. But I can imagine environments where it's like, oh, you didn't send out enough emails today. Yeah.

So I think it starts out, the servant leadership starts out for me that leads to being able to use the data is What I always tell people when I manage a team, their goals actually become my goals and my job's to serve them to help them reach their goals.

Right, yeah, that's right.

So that's how I lead it.

How do you manage them with metrics without becoming the, you have to make 20 calls.

So what I learned from that is I have to learn their goals and I have to understand their goals and what it means.

And then what I, okay, yeah.

So I have to learn what they wanna do 'cause now I'm gonna serve them and help them reach their goals. And my job is to knock down roadblocks, provide them the tools and the support that they need to reach their goals, and I'm going to serve them from that perspective. Now, the difference is, is what I always tell them—

okay, yeah, you're not always telling them what to do, you're asking them what they— what their goals are and then helping them achieve those goals in whatever way, rather than—

and now, yeah, okay, it's a two-way accountability. I tell my— I actually emailed one of my recruiters yesterday, said, hey, I just do quick check-in. We're on different time zones and I was traveling. Normally I do it live. I want to check in with you and make sure that I'm still supporting you in the way that you need to reach your goals. Now the other part of it is, is my job is to hold them accountable. If they want to achieve their goals, there's some accountability that comes with it. They have to do the work, and I'm going to use the data to see how they are performing at that. And now we're going to have a conversation of I'm serving you, and, and if If I'm doing what I said you wanted to go here, here's what the numbers say. What, what's the disconnect? Am I not giving you— in the first question, am I not giving you the tools that you need? Am I not having the conversations that you need? Am I not supporting and talking to the people behind you that you need to get you what you need? If not, that's on me. I will fix that. The work still has to get done. So what are you doing with the work for you to achieve your goals?

I may be—

their goals may be my goals, but I'm not doing the work for them. That's the difference. I will separate always and say, I will serve you all day. I will— if someone is not providing you the feedback that you need, and we have the documentation that they're going to, and we have all this, I'm the first one standing up, knocking on the door, saying, where's my feedback? What are we doing? Why are you not supporting? What's going on? Now, if we're not holding up our side of the deal, guess what? I'm going to apologize because it's my department. But then on the back side, I'm going to have a conversation saying, what are we going to do differently? Because your numbers are saying You're telling me this is supposed to be happening. Your numbers are saying something different. So that's kind of how I work and where my servant leadership leads into the metrics, because I'm a firm believer if everyone understands the expectations that they have and they're going to reach their goals and objectives, I tend to believe the optimist that I am still, that people want to do good and they're going to work towards that.

Yeah. That's, that's a good thing to do because if they don't, that's an exception, but not, you know, yeah, we're expecting.

So I don't know if that's what you were, you were expecting.

You are answering, definitely answering the question that I asked, and then some, um, because you don't want to get caught, you know, you're saying, you're saying I'm not going to look at the data and then tell people what the data tells me that they should be doing. It's You know, I'm going to look at what they need to do, what they want to do, what their goals are, and then use the data to help me figure out whether or not I'm doing a good job by them and where I can help them. Not to, you know, beat them over the head with it, with the numbers, but to, you know, use the data to find out, like, to diagnose.

And then I want them to know their numbers. I want them to understand it, right? I have some recruiters saying, hey, this week this happened, and I know if you look at this, you're going to see that I didn't have as many people on site for interviews, but let me, let me walk you through what was happening behind the scenes, and we're actually in a better place. Cool. This is also them learning how to advocate and show what they're doing, and they're growing without me having to be the person saying, go do work.

Okay, let's talk about go do work. If, if I was just to like hand over a mid-sized TA team, like, you know, say you were gonna backfill me and, and, and fill my shoes at some organization, and, um, I'm handing over this team and I said, uh, I want you to put AI into it. Like, you know, I got promoted, I'm bringing you in to backfill me, you're gonna run TA now, and it's a mid-sized team, and I'm literally saying AI is mandatory. So you're not, you're not evaluating whether or not we want to use AI or whatever. I'm removing that from the equation. I'm just saying automate something. Because I— the reason I'm asking this is I'm not saying I would do this, but I'm seeing it happen. So, you know, people are like, you've got to use— like, for example, um, what my, my favorite example, a very, very large consulting firm, um, that's one of the top 5. It starts with an A. I can't tell you who it is, but it's It's got an accent in the name, right? Um, weird. Yeah, weird how that works. They— there was an article about how they have now mandated that all of the executives, all of the senior people, have to demonstrate with proof, with evidence, how they're using AI at work in order to be considered for a promotion. So if you can't show that you're using AI you won't even get promoted. That is like, that is just next level. Yeah, that is mandate. That is putting the cart, not just the cart before the horse, but that's like putting the cart before the horse when what you need is an airplane. I mean, you just like, it's, that's so awesome. But anyway, I see this happening in PA. So circling back, if I handed over this team and I said you gotta do AI, what would you automate first? Because there might be a few things, um, number one. And number two, what would you protect at all costs and refuse to automate? So what would you definitely be like, oh, this is easy, I'm gonna automate this? And what would you be like, hell no, I am not ever automating this?

Well, um, I mean, the low-hanging fruit is, uh, I would automate the scheduling of interviews. So I'll just— I'll put that one on there. I mean, that's a no-brainer, right? We all work Yeah, there's so many people that still do manual scheduling and it drives me insane. Um, I would look at that and then I would honestly— I'll never— I, I will never automate AI making a decision for me. That's the first thing.

So then I would start looking at decisions.

Yep, correct. So I would start looking at anything that's in my process that is not a decision-based action, and I would see if I can automate it. So there isn't one that I would say is the most high priority. I would literally say anything that is not a decision-based action, okay, it's at least on the table to be automated.

Anything not decision-based, we're going to look at, but then we're going to use numbers to figure out where the friction, where the priority is.

Is it something that we need to attack right now? Is this just a pipe dream. Like, one of the things that I would love to automate in, um, is frontline working, because that's where I'm at now. Frontline workers and what we apply all the time is— I love the fact that you can now use AI and automate to have the ability to have video interviews 24/7 with an AI agent. I think the— and the reason people are like, but that's making a decision, I'm like, no, no, no, it's an interview. I can dictate, I can literally make them say the questions that I want, I can get the transcript, I can read it, and I can make the decision. With frontline workers, they don't have the availability to interview whenever I need them to, and the industry is behind the times on that because a lot of times what you find is, I need you to interview at 2:30. Well, it's my shift at my other job, I, I can't. What am I supposed to do? Are we not going to consider them? Where, you know, you can start to have 24/7 AI interviews. So I'd look at that, but there isn't one that I would sit there and go to the top other than I know for a fact that if it was my way, there is no such thing as manual calendaring of interviews anymore.

Okay.

And then I would also look in their interviews. I would use AI to do all the transcripts for my interviews because that is a task-based that I want my recruiter to be present in those interviews. I want the AI agent or AI recruiter recording of, of the transcript of the interviews and key takeaway points based on what I say. I want to make sure, do they emphasize this or do they emphasize that? Because I want my recruiter to be present in the conversation.

So that's a really good point, and not just the recruiter but the hiring manager. But there are some safety issues, there's some privacy, and there's some legal complications with that that I don't want to— this isn't the right forum for that, but you know, when you're recording— well, when you're recording anything, I mean, there's entanglements. Like, for example, in some states you are required to have disclosures.

Yeah.

On, you know, there's other complications, like there might be confidential or proprietary information in there. There's, you know, all kinds of risks. So there are some— there's ways that you can do it, but you don't want to just go in there and, um, you don't want to just go in there and like launch automated interviewing because you think it's a good idea. There are some risks to it. Okay.

Yeah, this is something when I say, I say like, this is a vetting out, does this work for our industry? Is this something like what you said? Like, how does this, what are the risks that fall behind it? This is more if I built it myself and I knew that I could do it and I was going to make sure that all the risk mitigations were done. I, I just think from a frontline worker standpoint, knowing that they can interview whenever they need to as opposed to the opposite, um, it's just huge for them. It's just a— it's a— it gives access to people to new jobs that they never thought they could have access because they're always working. There's no other way to say it. And that's so important for me. Um, that's access. It's so big.

Yeah, I'm thinking about something.

Oh, you're good, man.

So, um, I'm thinking about the accessibility. And so you— yeah, I hear what you're saying. So in other words, putting this together, you've got recruiters that work 9 to 5, whatever, and they work regular work hours. And you've got these, uh, lines people that are— or, you know, frontline workers that are working 3 shifts. Um, and some of, you know, sometimes they're just not available for interviews. You don't want they're sleeping when we're working and they're— and you're sleeping when they're available. So giving them an opportunity to have asynchronous interviews, I get that. Um, but how are you handling the, the breaking points where like if they do need a human that gets flagged for like review overnight and then comes back the next? So there's like a delay, but you're handling it.

Yeah, I think that's where like the— I mean, you're right, it's, it's not perfect because I'm obviously not going to pass decision-making over to, um, AI, but it at least gives them an access to be interviewed and me being able to review what that interview is.

Absolutely. Yeah, no, that's great. I mean, that, that wouldn't be there, right? So there's a— yeah, this is like then do this without this AI interview and you couldn't do it because of the time difference or it would be really difficult, really awkward. So you're providing them an opportunity to do that and they're probably grateful for that. And I'm just thinking about like where is that kind of point of failure that you need to watch out for if somebody's out there listening and going, what a really good idea, we should definitely, we have frontline workers, we should put in AI interviewing and they don't just go and buy the next tool that comes up.

Yeah, it's got it, you got to have access to First off, review what the AI interview is doing and then challenge it and continue to make sure that there's no biases coming in. Because if it's—

and that's the black box versus—

yeah, yeah, you got to continue to do that. And then again, because now they have the access and you review it, now if there's direct interest and I know it's for a second shift, like you said, it's perfect. I'm— they're, they're— or third shift, they're going— they're sleeping while I'm working, but they have this time period before they go to shift at 10. That now maybe I can get a— once I had— now I can get— I had the initial interview done and I can, and I can see the match and I have people that can interview, whether it's text messages or quick emails.

Yeah, because instead of blocking out an hour of your time or whatever, I mean, how many times you see people—

and I see it a lot— frontline workers, they just don't have solid resumes. It's not their fault. It's not their fault. I mean, no, it's sad.

So you're basically— it's, it's It's providing an opportunity where one wasn't before. And you're not using AI as an automated decision-making tool. You're using it as an opportunity creation tool. So the AI is not rejecting people. You're using it because this is the only way you can get to interview them. Someone human is still looking at these. Absolutely. And making the— yeah. And so that's where everything shifts. From bad to this is really good, this is enabling the process, this is better for both sides, and the risk is reduced. It's when people use AI, which I'm seeing, uh, and I'm just gonna— hopefully, you know what, sometimes to make an omelet you gotta crack an egg or two. I'm just saying, once or twice. But I'm getting this— yeah, I've heard that too. But I'm getting this— sometimes I get these questions like, how do we How do we reduce the inflow, the overwhelming inflow of robotic applicants and AI applicants? Oh, I know, let's put in AI interviewing. And I'm just like, oh, that is so the wrong reason. Like, your reason for putting in AI interviewing is a really good reason, and it's helping the candidates, it's helping the company. And, you know, but the other reason of like, we need to put in AI interviewing as barrier to automatically reject everyone in an automated way. That's kind of like just the wrong thinking.

Yeah, once again, I— you can't automate decision-making, right?

But they're not even doing that. They're literally saying AI is not automating decision-making, AI is automating rejections, because they're gonna just use it to get rid of everybody.

If you, uh, if you don't complete the interview, we're just gonna reject you.

It's a step in the process.

Yeah, no, it's— again, it's, it's not perfect. And the great thing about recruiting is you can go over time, over all time of interviewing, hiring, there is nothing perfect. Yeah, there just isn't. And this is what I'm always talking about, like when I hear people saying, oh, I am the best at hiring, and I'm gonna go like, really? Really?

I'm the best at hiring for this job at this company. Thank you.

Like, I'm like, no, you're not. Like, I, I promise you, we're humans. We are flawed individuals. Like, we are not perfect. We make mistakes. It's always to tell people, I go, humans are the greatest variable on Earth. And guess what? I spend my life trying to hire them.

Right, yeah, literally. It's actually— but you know what though, that's funny because we talk about human capital and it's like if you, if you talk to a CFO, most of the time people are a liability, part of the debits and credits equation, not an asset. You know, it's not a— it's not capital, it's liability. It's like, um, you know, liability, just basically looking at payroll is— that's a liability, that's money you owe. So, you know, humans are literally a liability. Um, So, and, and we're trying to automate, like, we're trying to automate that with AI. We're trying to get— it was— I just want to feed you back what you just said because sometimes I have this habit of processing something that, um, that I was— that I heard, and I, and I, I can hear it correctly and give it back to you, and you'll be shocked at what you said. Or I can hear it incorrectly and give it back to you and be like, how the hell did you get that from what I said? So here's what I said. I mean, here's what I heard. I heard that we are the most imperfect, mistake-prone part of the entire process, and we're trying to automate that with AI. Yes, you are trying to automate— just want to hear this again— you are trying to make imperfection human automated. Yep, that's the problem right there.

You've nailed it.

If you try to— you know, AI is going to try to make it perfect. Yes, because it wants to— it wants a formula, and there isn't one. So it's like you're automating the formula.

Well, it's, it's the exact same reasons, like, why do they try to automate manufacturing lines? To fix errors.

Yeah, because humans can do that with manufacturing lines.

Right, but it— but you know what the value part is? Human error. They're still not 100% perfect.

No, they're not.

No, even fully automated manufacturing lines do not run with 100% perfection rate. So yet we're trying to do it with the greatest imperfect things on Earth.

Right, our business is the most imperfect, most human, most error-prone of all businesses because it involves 3 egos. That are variable versus assembly line. And the assembly lines aren't perfect, and they have a very, very formula, very, you know, repetitive-driven process. And we're just trying to automate the humans, which just makes it just absolutely ridiculous. That's a huge epiphany right there. But I will tell you the anecdote of what I know happens with TQM, total quality management, and robotic processes and everything that came back from, you know, the, the, the days of standardization from Ford all the way to today, um, which is these robots are really, really good at doing one thing, right? So if it's gonna— if it's gonna put a rivet in a hole, it's gonna do that faster, more accurately, and more precisely than, than a human ever could. It's going to put that rivet in that hole in a, you know, perfect way. But if the hole is accidentally shifted by a millimeter because of something that happened, it can't do the job. So here's what the robot doesn't do. The robot doesn't stop, fix the problem, and then put the rivet in the hole. What the robot does is it stops everything and it says there's a problem. Yep. And a human has to come in and fix the line. Yeah. So the robot is automating it as long as everything's going perfectly, but when everything— when something is off, a human has to come in, the robot doesn't fix it. We are expecting our robots to go in and fix the hole so the rivet can go in, not realizing that that is the one thing you really can't automate. That's— yeah, I'm feeding you back what you said. This is your—

this is what I believe. This is why I want AI to take care of tasks that can be repeatable, that if we set it up and feed it 'Hey, rivet in the hole.' I want that done by someone else because then I can have my—

you can step in and go, 'Let me fix this for you,' and then go back to filling that, right?

And then I can have my humans focusing on what the humans— like, this is why I believe that AI done right, we're more human. Like I said, access to those people that can interview, they're going to know it's an AI individual that's doing it, but if they can sit and have a conversation where the person's asking and they can talk. I don't care if it's just whatever it is, you've just given access to a group of people that never had access to something.

Yep. And that's great, that's awesome, that's enabling the workflow, that's making it, you know, you're expanding your, your talent landscape. Yeah, I mean, I think that's— so there's a lot of benefits. And that may really circles back to what would you automate and what would you not, um, and it answers a really good question, which is there are things that are gonna broaden your talent pool, give you more access, and there might be a little bit of risk, but you can mitigate that. And then there are things that are gonna give you a lot of risk that are not going to broaden your access or make anything easier. Literally just exposing yourself to risk for no reason.

Yes.

And that's what I just kind of cringe and go, why are we trying to automate this? Why are we— You know, you see all those memes about the, the, the robotic, um, food delivery boxes, the little robots, and like all the trouble they get into. They're causing accidents or falling into holes, or it's like, what exactly are we trying? Is it really that challenging for a bike messenger to deliver a sandwich? I mean, why do we need to automate that? The answer really is because we don't have enough people that can be bike messengers. So, you know, that's why we're automating it. We're not automating it to get rid of bike messengers. We're automating it because we don't have any bike messengers.

You are, uh, there's a choir that you're preaching to over here. So that's why, like, my favorite question on earth, and it, as a parent, it drives parents nuts a lot, but the question is why. Yeah, why are we really trying to do this and what are we solving? If you ask those two questions, typically I can figure, you can kind of figure out where someone's coming from.

If you ask those two questions, most of the reasons people want to use AI and TA go away.

Yeah, wait, what?

Oh, never mind. What was I thinking? Why would I want to do— I don't know, I just thought it was cool, you know. That's why I prefaced this with, if I handed you a team and said you had to automate, you didn't have the choice to say why. And I did that to take the why away because I know that if you say why, I'd be like, Because, you know, because company— here, we just bought you a million-dollar LinkedIn Recruiter license. You have to use it so that we can show the board that we spent the money in the right place. Yeah, but why? We don't use LinkedIn. None of our people are on LinkedIn. Yeah, but we bought you the license, so you have to use it. Yeah, but it's not— it's gonna make our job harder. Yeah, they're like, oh well, well, we just paid for it, so you know, you got to use it. Yeah, man, this has been, this has been hilarious. Um, I, I usually close my Shelly's Alloys— we're getting at the end of this— and I usually close with asking my guests to provide me with a thought that we can ask ourselves during the weekend, right? Like something introspective. So What do you think we should ask ourselves to be introspective about anything that we talked about today? Don't give us the answer, just the question.

No, I'm going to kind of give the preface of why I have this question. So, okay, I have— you look at my resume and I say this, like, there was a long time where it was like job after job after job after job, and I was chasing something.

Money.

Money. Title, whatever I thought I needed.

Employment. Yeah, that—

I mean, some of that was out of that, but some of it was, as it was just a— it was an ego-driven, why am I doing this kind of thing. And you have those moments where you actually have to ask yourself a question, just like you're doing. And I asked, what is it that I've— the— I said, you got to sum up in a word what you're looking for to do with your life. And the word came down to value. So I always ask myself when I go into the weekend, what value have What value am I adding to the world and what value is what I'm doing adding to me? And I do it and I always say I no longer chase title or money, I chase value. If you are not adding value to— if I don't feel I'm adding value to society, I question why am I doing it? They're not adding value to me and my family, I ask why am I doing it? If my opinion is not valued, I ask why am I doing it? So I always say this, if you want to know kind of what you're doing, ask yourself, where's the value in what you're in, in the life that you're trying to achieve?

Okay, so the question for listeners is, ask yourself, how are you adding value? And if you're not, then why are you there? Why are you doing that, whatever that is? Yeah. How are you adding value? Because maybe you never thought about it, so think about it now. Take a moment to think about how are you adding value rather than just, you know, collecting a paycheck. And that's fine, we all got to collect the paycheck, but how are you—

Absolutely.

They're giving you a paycheck for something. They're giving you— so what is that? So how are you adding value? Um, and, and if that's not the value you want to have, then why are you there?

And can you get it? Can you do something else there at that place, right? Like, maybe it's you don't see the value that you're adding and you need to ask. Sometimes we just don't know.

We just don't know. Yeah, they know but we don't. That's a good point. Yeah, that's good. I like that. Awesome. Well, dude, have a safe return back from your football trip.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. European football, European football, just in case.

Soccer.

Yes. Yeah, make sure we're saying it right, otherwise you get in trouble.

That's right. Football is, uh, football is— football is where, you know, where I grew up we call it football.

Yes, you nailed it. No, this was wonderful. I can't thank you enough for having me on.

Awesome. Well, I can't wait to have you back in Atlanta and see you around, man. Appreciate it.

Absolutely.

All right, everybody, y'all take care of yourselves and be kind